Embodying inequality: Bodily aesthetics, tattoo and social distinction
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| Autor: | |
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| Format: | artículo original |
| Estat: | Versión publicada |
| Data de publicació: | 2025 |
| Descripció: | This article examines how bodily aesthetic practices—particularly tattooing—function as devices of distinction and symbolic inequality in Mexico City. Based on a qualitative approach combining semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation, the study explores the moral and aesthetic judgments people mobilize when assessing tattooed bodies, showing how these evaluations condense structures of class, gender, and race. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, it argues that taste operates as a moral boundary that transforms material differences into legitimate differences of value, while the tattooed body becomes a surface on which social hierarchies are inscribed and contested. Findings reveal that, beneath contemporary discourses of autonomy and authenticity, subtle forms of symbolic violence persist—justifying contempt and displacing structural inequalities into the realm of individual responsibility. The narratives analyzed expose how aesthetic distinction relies on the moral disqualification of others and the pathologization of certain bodies, legitimizing inequality through the language of health, effort, and “good taste.” The study advances an understanding of the tattooed body as a site where social hierarchies are materialized and the limits of respectability are negotiated. By showing how symbolic inequalities unfold in everyday judgments and gazes, the analysis reveals that bodily aesthetics are also moral and political practices through which distinction and exclusion are embodied. |
| Pais: | Portal de Revistas TEC |
| Institution: | Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica |
| Repositorio: | Portal de Revistas TEC |
| Idioma: | Español |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/8321 |
| Accés en línia: | https://revistas.tec.ac.cr/index.php/trama/article/view/8321 |
| Paraula clau: | estética corporal desigualdad simbólica tatuaje distinción social violencia simbólica bodily aesthetics symbolic inequality tattoo social distinction symbolic violence |